Issue resolution is critical to the information technology (IT) services business. A service provider might need to handle, on a daily basis, thousands of “tickets” that report various types of issues (e.g., problems) from its customers. As is known, a “ticket” is a record or log describing an issue raised by a customer that is to be acted upon by a service provider. The log or record may be in electronic form or paper form.
The service provider's ability to resolve the tickets (i.e., ticket resolution) in a timely manner determines, to a large extent, its competitive advantage. To attempt to manage ticket resolution effectively, human experts are often organized into expert groups (collectively, an “expert network”), each of which has the expertise to solve certain types of problems. As IT systems become more complex, the types of reported problems become more diverse. Finding an expert group to solve the problem specified in a ticket is a long-standing challenge for IT service providers.